Swift and Veritran Team on Improved Cross-Border Payments

Banking platform Veritran has launched a partnership with financial messaging service Swift.

The collaboration, announced Monday (April 29), is designed to help financial institutions to offer customers enhanced and streamlined cross-border payments.

“Collaborations such as this are improving the experience for those sending payments cross-border, while also increasing transparency and security to improve the ecosystem as a whole,” Juan Carlos Botrán, Swift’s global head of API acceleration, said in a news release.

“It’s vital that industry players work together in this way to overcome increasing fragmentation in the cross-border payments landscape.”

By joining Swift’s partner program, Veritran’s clients will be able to offer their end users access to Swift solutions designed to increase transparency and security in cross-border payments. These include the Swift GPI Tracker, which lets users check a payment’s status for increased transparency in cross-border payments, and payment pre-validation, which validates beneficiary data before a payment is sent.

As PYMNTS wrote earlier this year, cross-border payments have rebounded alongside global trade, although businesses entering foreign markets often realize that traditional cross-border payment methods, such as wire transfers, are rife with delays and complexities.

U.S. merchants lost $3.8 billion in last year alone to faulty cross-border payments, according to data in the PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Cross-Border Sales and the Challenge of Failed Payments.” That study also found that 70% of U.S. firms saw higher rates of failed payments in cross-border sales compared to domestic sales.

“Traditional cross-border payment systems are often slow, involving multiple intermediaries and manual processes, which can take several days to complete transactions,” PYMNTS wrote. “Innovation can streamline these processes, reducing the time it takes for funds to transfer from one country to another.”

For B2B companies, a lack of visibility into international transactions can hinder working capital strategies and leave businesses with no clue about crucial operating information.

“The cross-border B2B market is growing massively,” Neil Drennan, chief technology officer at Visa Cross-Border Solutions told PYMNTS in a separate interview posted last year. He stressed that this rapid growth means there are more businesses than ever seeking to move money around the globe “quickly and transparently, with complete clarity around costs.”